Inside the reactor core of one of North Korea's nuclear plants (Source: AP)

Many scientists are discounting that the secretive dictatorship made a true breakthrough

A
mystery is emerging on the Korean peninsula. The nation of
North Korea, which has long been suspected of developing
nuclear weapons, announced on May 12 that it had achieved
clean nuclear fusion and was ready to began rolling out
virtually free power. The claim did not receive that much
serious attention because it was simply so unbelievable.

Now
the mystery has deepened, with the South Korean government scientists
revealing that they detected abnormal
levels of radioactive xenon gas -- eight times above the
normal background level -- only two days after the fusion
announcement.

It seems highly unlikely that the fusion
reaction occurred as North Korea claims as fission typically produces
large isotopes, while fusion uses small atoms like deuterium (a
hydrogen isotope). Granted, many scientists have theorized that
fission can be tied to fusion to create
hybrid reactors and such reactors would likely
be capable of producing heavy isotopes.

Professor David Hinde,
who is the department head of nuclear physics at The Australian
National University says the release is more likely to have come from
a traditional fission device. He states, "It would have to
be man-generated unless one came up with some very unusual
alternative scenario. The lifetime of those radioactive xenon
isotopes, they're not terribly long. So it could not be anything that
came naturally, I would say. Heavy xenon isotopes could be a
signature of a fission device of some kind."

The easiest
explanation would be that North Korea conducted a nuclear weapons
test. It revealed in 2008 that it has several
nuclear weapons stockpiled. However, such a test would have
created seismic activity and South Korean officials detected no
corresponding seismic events.

Xenon is colorless, odorless,
and largely inert noble gas thats found in minute levels in the
atmosphere. The noble gases xenon and krypton are typically
used to detect nuclear activity. The levels of gas detected by
South Korea are a clear marker of nuclear activity, but do not pose a
health risk to citizens.

North Korea did conduct
nuclear weapons tests in 2006, which were detected. It received
international condemnation for these tests and UN sanctions.

You can paint it as colorful as you want, but it doesn't change a bit of the fact that USofA remains the only country in the world who dropped weapons of mass destructions, not one, but two times, on a defeated country.

A Beaten Country

Apart from the moral questions involved, were the atomic bombings militarily necessary? By any rational yardstick, they were not. Japan already had been defeated militarily by June 1945. Almost nothing was left of the once mighty Imperial Navy, and Japan's air force had been all but totally destroyed. Against only token opposition, American war planes ranged at will over the country, and US bombers rained down devastation on her cities, steadily reducing them to rubble.

What was left of Japan's factories and workshops struggled fitfully to turn out weapons and other goods from inadequate raw materials. (Oil supplies had not been available since April.) By July about a quarter of all the houses in Japan had been destroyed, and her transportation system was near collapse. Food had become so scarce that most Japanese were subsisting on a sub-starvation diet.

On the night of March 9-10, 1945, a wave of 300 American bombers struck Tokyo, killing 100,000 people. Dropping nearly 1,700 tons of bombs, the war planes ravaged much of the capital city, completely burning out 16 square miles and destroying a quarter of a million structures. A million residents were left homeless.

On May 23, eleven weeks later, came the greatest air raid of the Pacific War, when 520 giant B-29 "Superfortress" bombers unleashed 4,500 tons of incendiary bombs on the heart of the already battered Japanese capital. Generating gale-force winds, the exploding incendiaries obliterated Tokyo's commercial center and railway yards, and consumed the Ginza entertainment district. Two days later, on May 25, a second strike of 502 "Superfortress" planes roared low over Tokyo, raining down some 4,000 tons of explosives. Together these two B-29 raids destroyed 56 square miles of the Japanese capital.

Even before the Hiroshima attack, American air force General Curtis LeMay boasted that American bombers were "driving them [Japanese] back to the stone age." Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: "It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." This was confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: "Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s."

Japan Seeks Peace

Months before the end of the war, Japan's leaders recognized that defeat was inevitable. In April 1945 a new government headed by Kantaro Suzuki took office with the mission of ending the war. When Germany capitulated in early May, the Japanese understood that the British and Americans would now direct the full fury of their awesome military power exclusively against them.

American officials, having long since broken Japan's secret codes, knew from intercepted messages that the country's leaders were seeking to end the war on terms as favorable as possible. Details of these efforts were known from decoded secret communications between the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo and Japanese diplomats abroad.

Although Japanese peace feelers had been sent out as early as September 1944 (and [China's] Chiang Kai-shek had been approached regarding surrender possibilities in December 1944), the real effort to end the war began in the spring of 1945. This effort stressed the role of the Soviet Union ...

In mid-April [1945] the [US] Joint Intelligence Committee reported that Japanese leaders were looking for a way to modify the surrender terms to end the war. The State Department was convinced the Emperor was actively seeking a way to stop the fighting.